The burned out complex fell out of sight as they traveled on, but a profound sadness remained in the professor’s eyes. The wrought iron gate had indicated that the whole complex, not just the one surviving building, had been his: Josston Mills Complex 4. She did not think it was so much the loss of the buildings and industry that saddened him—he’d turned his back on it after all, to pursue archeology.
“People died in that fire, didn’t they,” she murmured.
“It is the practice to nail the windows shut, lock the doors, and chain the slaves to their looms. They hadn’t a chance. Hundreds of them died.”
Horrified, Karigan could only stare at him, but he dropped his face into his hands as if to blind himself against the memories. He must relive them every time he passed the complex.
“That is when I devoted myself entirely to archeology. And the cause,” he said, his voice muffled. Karigan recalled the slip of paper, the article, she had found tucked into a novel Mirriam had given her. It had mentioned the professor’s giving up industry for archeology, but said nothing of the fire. Either it was a small grace for the professor, or the deaths of hundreds of slaves was not noteworthy to this society. She rather thought the latter.
Sunlight flickered across the professor’s haunted features. “Sometimes I suspect it was arson, someone who knew my leanings trying to tear me down, but there was never any evidence despite thorough investigations. Though the investigators were the emperor’s men, of course.”
They sat in silence for some time, the carriage rumbling along, and Karigan wondered how Raven fared as he followed behind.
“Where are we headed now?” Karigan asked to break the silence and the pall that had settled over them.
The professor gave her a bleak smile. “To see even more devastation.”
TWO OUT OF TIME
The carriage surged forward past more mill complexes before it turned north and crossed a bridge over the canal and then a second bridge, traversing the glistening strip of blue that was the north branch of the Amber River. Karigan shook her head not seeing anything that reminded her of her own Sacor City. If she hadn’t seen the section that lay underground, she might not believe this was the same place at all.
Even more devastation? She pondered the professor’s words as the carriage thudded and jolted over rougher ground. She shuddered with foreboding, beginning to guess what he was going to show her.
The carriage began to rise, the road growing more bumpy. Raven whinnied and snorted behind them as they climbed. Gradually the well-ordered city gave way to ramshackle wooden buildings, rundown houses, and shanties with squatters sitting outside on steps and old crates, watching their passage with hostile eyes. Was this the devastation he meant to show her?
“Dregs,” the professor muttered. “So low on the ladder they scavenge the city’s leavings but not low enough to be slaves. They exist in forgotten places, the abandoned buildings and hidden alleys, and here on the edge of devastation. The Inspectors round them up now and then, and there’s been talk of burning them out of here, but they always come back and find a place. A good many of them are the ones who dig up illicit artifacts and sell them off to the likes of Rudman Hadley for his circus. Ghouls, we call them, those who dig up the dead.”
As they continued to climb, all habitation fell away, and the landscape was strewn with rock and rubble, through which poked scrub brush and stunted trees. To one side of the carriage, a rocky escarpment sloped down until it met the river, and beyond it lay Mill City with its regular angles of buildings and streets and the shimmering network of canals, like veins of blue, stemming from the west branch of the river.
The professor pointed out gatehouses and dams along the river, and locks on the canals, and explained at great length how they controlled the force of water flowing into the mills to power the turbines, which in turn powered the machines. Karigan barely listened, her attention pulled to the view on the other side of the carriage, to the great immense mount of talus and scrub that rose high beyond what she could see through her window.
When the carriage halted, the professor stepped out and extended his hand to help her down. Her feet prickled when they touched ground. The sensation traveled up her legs and into her spine as if the land were trying to send her a message, or was screaming. Her sense of foreboding intensified. Her breath caught in her throat. Her mouth grew dry.
“Do you know what this is?” the professor asked, gesturing to the mount.
She could not see its summit even from outside the carriage. She was too close. The sloping uneven terrain was cluttered with . . . She looked closer to hand, just off the rutted track the carriage had followed. Rotted, half-burned timbers. Piles of rock shaped not by nature, but the tools of men. As her gaze sought details, she found patterns—the foundations of walls, a well hole, a half-toppled chimney. The land jabbed at her feet as though it knew her, reached out to her.
“Sacor City,” she whispered.
“Yes,” the professor replied. “What remains.”
Karigan wailed and dropped to her knees, oblivious to the professor at her side and Luke looking down in alarm from his perch on the carriage. On her many travels she’d seen the ruins of ancient habitations, not least of which had been the lands of lost Argenthyne. She’d seen what abandonment, time, and nature had done there, leaving a once-great civilization in ruin. She, however, never expected to see her own city in such a state.
Not just ruin, but purposeful destruction. This wasn’t just the work of time and nature on an abandoned city. Sacor City had been defeated and systematically obliterated. She could see it before her, walls being torn down by unimaginable forces, fires raging, people scrambling in terror. She closed her eyes, trembling. What forces could have leveled the city? Altered the landscape enough to divert a river? What of the people? Her friends? The king? Perhaps that is what the land remembered: the echo of all those souls.